April 28, 2006

It's hard to avoid suspecting that's how filmmaker Paul Weitz ended his pitch to Universal of the clever concept and casting for his roman à clef comedy "American Dreamz."

Having made "About a Boy" with Hugh Grant in 2002 and "In Good Company" with Dennis Quaid in 2005, both solid films, it must have seen only natural to Weitz (son of fashion designer turned historian John Weitz) to cast the two veterans together.

After dithering away the early years of his career as a fluttery romantic lead, Grant has emerged since 2001's "Bridget Jones' Diary" as Hollywood's finest cad, a worthy successor to the sardonic George Sanders. So why not have Grant play a self-loathing game show host based on Simon Cowell, the scathing English judge on the top-rated television show of the decade, American Idol?

Back in the 1980s, Quaid's status was a lot like Ronald Reagan's in the early 1940s -- a likeable and reliable second-tier leading man. Then, Quaid wrecked his career with cocaine. He has made a comeback playing middle-aged Texans (winningly in "The Rookie" as a washed up minor leaguer, and distressingly in "The Alamo" as a Sam Houston who seems to be suffering from a gastrointestinal malady). So, let's cast him as a clueless doofus based on George W. Bush!...

One problem with "American Dreamz" as a satire is that American Idol is one of those rare pop culture phenomena, like the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire quiz show a half dozen years ago, that just isn't all that deplorable. Idol's basic appeal is ancient: it's a singing contest for the whole family to watch. And its most controversial feature -- Simon's blunt advice to many entrants to discard their dreams and get a real job, something that powerful men in the music industry are not always known for saying when confronted with pretty but talentless girls desperate for a break -- is also its most admirable. (If you wonder how movie people can be so self-righteous despite their often dubious personal behavior, one answer lies in their ability to say, "At least we're not music executives.")

Away from the glowing, glass-tinted visions of India harboured by the "Indo-philes", there is a different India - one that is seething with social, economic and political conflict.

Consider this article "Quota: India Inc. Gives In?" The idea that "reservations" (quotas for backward castes) ought to be introduced into the Private Sector has been floating around for some time but Indian corporates managed to keep these pressures at bay. It was, however, always going to be an uphill struggle and now they seem to have caved in to some degree. Note also that the main proponents of these quotas are actually high caste politicians (similar in their opportunism and lack of principle to white politicians who favour affirmative action). The difference between the West and India is that in the West, affirmative action rests on whites feeling guilty. It is therefore more tenuous because if whites stop feeling guilty at some future date (and they remain a majority), the quotas can be got rid of. In India, that would be impossible because the "backward caste" population is about 80-85 percent. In a one man one vote political system, ignoring the resentments of 85 percent of the electorate is akin to committing political suicide.

The other point that needs to be mentioned is that these quotas were enshrined in the Constitution. The Government created quotas for the Dalits (untouchables) and those were at 20 percent initially. The lawyers who drafted the Indian constitution (barring one) were all English educated, upper caste men who got us into this mess in the first place. The reservations were meant to be (as the constitution originally provided) for a period of 10 years (one has to laugh at stupidity of these so-called "statesmen" (I'm thinking principally of Nehru) who thought that 6000 year old caste inequality could be negated by government quotas within 10 years). Of course, they lasted well beyond their 10 years and they were soon expanded well beyond the more limited untouchable population to include all sorts of other castes and groups that hadn't suffered anything like the same level of discrimination.

It is difficult to say how damaging these "reforms" are likely to be. If it is no more than just as irritant, then we could go back to business as usual, hire the odd favoured caste candidate and hire the rest of the workforce as before. But if the requirements are more stringent than that (quotas in the public sector now exceed 50 percent), then we could eventually start seeing an outflow of business and capital from India.

This is a perfect example of what America could end up becoming - a country with an economically successful minority and a hostile, poor and incapable majority that seeks to grab the wealth of the productive through the medium of political power. And once that happens, there is no going back to the old ways. Once the people have the vote, it's game over.

And yet, caste quotas in India are more defensible than quotas for immigrants in America. Indeed, almost nobody who has ever thought about their existence ever tries to defend quotas for immigrants. Thomas Sowell writes:

There is another aspect of the immigration issue that has received little or no attention but can have a serious impact anyway. Amnesty would mean, for many illegal immigrants, that they would not merely have the same rights as American citizens, but special privileges as well.

Affirmative action laws and policies already apply to some immigrants. Members of a multimillionaire Cuban family have already received government contracts set aside for minority businesses. During one period, an absolute majority of the money paid to construction companies in Washington, D.C., went to Portuguese businessmen under the same preferences.

Immigrant members of Latino, Asian, or other minority groups are legally entitled to the same preferential benefits accorded native-born members of minority groups.

The moment they set foot on American soil, they are entitled to receive benefits created originally with the rationale that these benefits were to compensate for the injustices minorities had suffered in this country.

The illegal status of many "undocumented workers" can at least make them reluctant to claim these privileges. But, take away the illegality and they become not only equal to American citizens, but more than equal.

Preferential access to jobs, government contracts, and college admissions are among the many welfare state benefits that add to the costs of immigrants which are not paid by employers of "cheap labor" but which fall on the general public in taxes and in other ways.

Even when illegal immigrants do not claim preferential treatment, employers are still under pressure to hire according to the demographic composition of the local labor force, which includes these "undocumented workers." Employers are subject to legal penalties if the ethnic composition of their employees deviates much from the ethnic composition of the population.

"Cheap labor" can turn out to be the most expensive labor this country has ever had.

It's amusing in a sad way to see libertarians try to respond to the problems exacerbated by immigration: "All we have to do is get rid of affirmative action! All we have to do is get rid of the welfare state!" Well, swell ...

This Romanian film about a 62-year-old drunk's ambulance odyssey to four hospitals has to be just about the lowest budget film I've ever seen. It looks like it was filmed with a camcorder by an amateur -- when somebody starts speaking off-camera, the camera swings around and finds him a few words later. Being a European, the director of course explains that this was all part of his Theory. The press notes read:

Many shots in "Lazarescu" are taken with a shoulder-held camera. This gives the camera a subtle "human" presence that in part contradicts the otherwise infinite indifference. ... "My only directive to the cameraman was that we not move the camera too soon, because the camera movement shouldn't 'predict' the characters' lines or movement. Our camera goes after the real. The viewer, for their part, should be granted just enough space and distance from the film to be able to observe, and let their imaginations work."

Well, swell.

Of course, if the filmmaking shouldn't "predict," then why name the movie "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu"? Doesn't that kind of give the end of the movie away?

Still, it's at least marginally watchable, if grueling. The auteur wants the film to be about the "indifference of the universe," but what it's really about is how when you go to the hospital, you need somebody healthy by your side to do battle for you.

It's being marketed as a comedy, but you'd have to be pretty odd to find it a barrel of laughs.

Mr. Lazarescu is a hard-drinking widower who has a bad headache and stomach ache. He calls an ambulance, which takes him to a hospital emergency room swamped with teenagers with head injuries from a major bus accident. The doctor views Lazarescu as what American ER doctors call a GOMER and tells him to Get Out of My Emergency Room. That's hardly surprising when a man stinking of drink shows up complaining of a headache and bellyache.

Fortunately, the ambulance nurse feels sorry for him and takes him to another hospital ER. There she meets a nurse she's friends with who gets him slipped into the busy CAT scan facility. They find out he has both terminal liver cancer and bleeding in the brain, which is immediately life-threatening. But their neurosurgery ward is full of bus accident victims. So, onto hospital #3, where the pompous doctors get mad at the ambulance nurse for telling them what operation Lazarescu needs and throw her and the rapidly fading patient out. On to hospital #4, where he is treated kindly but dies before he can have his head operated on.

Back in March I spent four hours sitting in an emergency room bleeding following minor surgery. At the time, I was pretty sore about the ER triage nurse putting me at the bottom of their priority list, but they turned out to be right -- by the time they got around to me, I had (what do you know!) stopped bleeding of my own accord.

So, Mr. Lazarescu's sorry tale seems quite realistic to me. Indeed, without the ambulance nurse's surprising doggedness, he wouldn't have come even close to surviving the night. So, if you have a loved one who needs to go to the hospital, don't let them go alone.

April 26, 2006

During the Jim Crow era, many American communists fiercely fought racism. This is a fact. It is also a fact that segregationists and others often smeared civil rights activists by calling them communists. This technique is sometimes called guilt by association and sometimes "McCarthyism." If you think it's dead, you have not been following the controversy over a long essay about the so-called "Israel Lobby."

On April 5, for instance, The Post ran an op-ed, "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic," by Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a respected defense intellectual. Cohen does not much like a paper on the Israel lobby that was written by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University. He found it anti-Semitic. I did not.

But I did find Cohen's piece to be offensive. It starts by noting that the paper, titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," had been endorsed by David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan. It goes on to quote Duke, who, I am sure, has nodded his head in agreement over the years with an occasional piece of mine, as saying the paper is a "modern Declaration of American Independence." If you follow Cohen's reasoning, then you would have to conclude that David Duke and the Founding Fathers have something in common. I am not, as they say, willing to go there.

Unfortunately, Cohen's piece is not unique. The New York Sun reported on its front page of March 24 an allegation from Alan Dershowitz that some of the quotes from the Israel lobby paper "appear on hate sites." Maybe they do, but Mearsheimer and Walt took those quotes (about press coverage of Israel) from a book written by Max Frankel, a former editor of the New York Times. To associate Mearsheimer and Walt with hate groups is rank guilt by association and does not in any way rebut the argument made in their paper on the Israel lobby...

My own reading of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper found it unremarkable, a bit sloppy and one-sided (nothing here about the Arab oil lobby), but nothing that even a casual newspaper reader does not know. Its basic point -- that Israel's American supporters have immense influence over U.S. foreign policy -- is inarguable. After all, President Bush has just recently given Israel NATO-like status without so much as a murmur from Congress. "I made it clear, I'll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel," Bush said. This was the second or third time he's made this pledge, crossing a line that previous administrations would not -- in effect, promulgating a treaty seemingly on the spot. No other country gets this sort of treatment.

Israel's special place in U.S. foreign policy is deserved, in my view, and not entirely the product of lobbying. Israel has earned it, and isn't there something bracing about a special relationship that is not based on oil or markets or strategic location but on shared values? (A bit now like Britain.) But I can understand how foreign policy "realists" such as Mearsheimer and Walt might question its utility and not only think that a bit too much power is located in a specific lobby but that it is rarely even discussed...

An abridged version of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper was published by the London Review of Books and is available online at http://www.lrb.co.uk . Read it and decide for yourself whether it is anti-Semitic. Whatever the case, their argument is hardly rebutted by purple denunciations and smear tactics. Rather than being persuasive, Mearsheimer and Walt's more hysterical critics suggest by their extreme reactions that the duo is on to something. These tactics by Israel's friends sully Israel's good name more than Mearsheimer and Walt ever could.

Personally, I don't find America's special relationship with Israel all that bad for America. No matter what our relationship with Israel, we'd have lots of problems with the Arabs anyway, because they are Arabs. As I've said several times, the more America stays out of the Middle East, the more we can afford to indulge Israel. But the more we get involved on the ground in Arab countries, and thus become more dependent on not offending Arab popular prejudices, the more our soft spot for Israel becomes excessively expensive. The American Republic could afford favoring Israel, but the American Empire cannot.

Ironically, the chief cheerleaders for an American Empire have also been the chief cheerleaders for Likud, which says a lot about their strategic acumen.

Perhaps we should outsource our foreign policy-making to Israel, because Israeli governments often possess a hard-headed realism that we frequently lack. The Israeli government was a lot less enthusiastic about our Iraq Attaq than the civilians in the Pentagon. It's hard to imagine a Douglas Feith, for example, rising to such a crucial position in an Israeli government. For all his flaws (such as the tendency for massacres to happen on his watch), Ariel Sharon was a great man and a realist. Feith is a fool and a fantasist.

No, the real problem has been twofold: First, Iraq policy has been made not by Israelis but by Israeli-wannabes in Washington, not all of whom are Jewish. As Francis Fukuyama pointed out in The National Interest when Charles Krauthammer implied he was anti-Semitic:

"What I said in my critique of [Krauthammer's] speech was, of course, quite different. I said that there was a very coherent set of strategic ideas that have come out of Israel's experience dealing with the Arabs and the world community, having to do with threat perception, preemption, the relative balance of carrots and sticks to be used in dealing with the Arabs, the United Nations, and the like. Anyone who has dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict understands these ideas, and many people (myself included) believe that they were well suited to Israel's actual situation. You do not have to he Jewish to understand or adopt these ideas as your own, which is why people like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld share them. And it is not so hard to understand how one's experience of Arab-Israeli politics can come to color one's broader view of the world: The 1975 "Zionism is racism" resolution deeply discredited the UN, in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike, on issues having nothing to do with the Middle East. This is not about Judaism; it is about ideas. It would be quite disingenuous of Charles Krauthammer to assert that his view of how Israel needs to deal with the Arabs (that is, the testicular route to hearts and minds) has no impact on the way he thinks the United States should deal with them. And it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether this is the best way for the United States to proceed."

Second, you have to be very brave or very secure in your job or very Jewish to point out these facts.

As veteran truth-teller Thomas Sowell pointed out recently, "Phony arguments and phony words are the norm in discussions of immigration policy." And no myth has become more entrenched in the media than that California demonstrates that cracking down on illegal immigration would be political suicide for Republicans.

For example, reporter Dan Balz proclaimed in the Washington Post following the Senate's April 6th immigration "compromise" (i.e., surrender), "GOP officials … point to California as the example they hope to avoid. Twelve years ago, then-Gov. Pete Wilson (R) pushed an anti-immigration ballot measure that sought to deny state assistance to undocumented immigrants. The initiative passed and helped Wilson win reelection, but it triggered a surge of new Democratic Latino voters in subsequent elections that have left Republicans deep in the minority in the state."

This conventional wisdom is actually a bizarrely demonological distortion of the history of America's largest, most visible state. Instead of one man somehow permanently warping the political destiny of 37 million people, California's shift from the Republican to the Democratic column reflects tectonic demographic shifts, largely driven by immigration, that are spreading nationwide, and thus demand honest study.

The truth is close to the opposite. California voted for Republican Presidential candidates in nine of the ten elections from 1952 through 1988. The collapse of the California GOP first became evident in 1992, two years before Prop. 187, when Republicans got skunked in California in the Presidential election and two U.S. Senate races. In the last dozen major contests for President, governor, or senator there, Republicans have won only the two times they appealed to voter anger over illegal immigration. The ten times they meekly avoided the topic, they quietly went down to defeat...

It's often said that angry Latinos made subsequent Republican candidates pay for Wilson's sins, but where are the numbers? According to the Census Bureau, California Hispanics cast 11.4 percent of the vote in 1994 and 13.9 percent in 1998. In both elections, the Republican gubernatorial candidate won 23 percent of the Hispanic vote, so the celebrated "Latino tidal wave of anger" accounted for less than a tenth of the Republicans' plummet from Wilson's 55 percent in 1994 to Dan Lungren's 38 percent in 1998.

The often-trumpeted Hispanic political ascendancy hasn't quite gone through the formality of taking place yet (for example, Latinos comprised only 6.0 percent of voters nationally in 2004), even in California.

The Achilles' heel of Hispanic electoral clout has always been turnout. According to a 2002 study by demographers Jack Citrin and Benjamin Highton of the Public Policy Institute of California, although non-Hispanic whites made up only 47 percent of California's population in 2000, they will still cast a majority of the votes in California more than a third of a century from now. The PPIC forecasts that in 2040 whites will comprise 53 percent of California's electorate, twice the Hispanic share. (Of course, changes in immigration policy, such as the Senate's decision to put millions of illegal immigrants on the path to citizenship, could change this.)

In truth, Lungren lost because whites didn't show up and vote for him. While the number of Hispanic voters increased by 160,000 from 1994 to 1998 (out of 8.4 million votes cast), the non-Hispanic vote total dropped by 975,000. Without Prop. 187 to bring them to the polls, the percentage of non-Latinos voting fell from 41.4 percent to 35.9 percent.

Yet, what truly doomed him in 1998 was that, while Wilson had won 61 percent of the white vote in 1994, Lungren took just 45 percent. When a Republican doesn't win the white vote, he doesn't win the election. Period.

Indeed, out of the last dozen major races in California, the GOP has only won a majority of the white vote twice: Wilson in 1994, and in the 2003 recall, when Republicans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom McClintock garnered 67 percent.

All the GOP candidates in California avoided Wilson's winning anti-multiculturalist theme until the 2003 gubernatorial recall election in which the Democratic leadership foolishly handed the GOP its trump card by giving drivers licenses to illegal aliens.

Seaboard Corp. said it will close its Guymon, Oklahoma, pork plant on Monday [Mayday] to allow workers to attend rallies planned for that day in support of immigration reform, the company said. The plant has a daily hog slaughter capacity of about 16,000 head, the company said.

On Tuesday, Cargill Inc. said its five beef plants and two hog plants will be closed on Monday for the rallies.

Isn't it nice to see that the schism that opened up between liberals and slaughterhouse owners back in 1906 with the publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle has finally closed after a full century? Guess what? The slaughterhouses' Cheap Labor lobby has won.

By the way, here is my review of the 2004 film "A Day Without a Mexican," which provided the template for the upcoming Mayday demonstration general strike.

For some reason, I don't think the NYT will run dozens of articles about this story, just like they haven't given blanket coverage to the rape charge filed against the Naval Academy's quarterback. I guess, being a football quarterback just isn't a high profile position like being on the lacrosse team. That's the only explanation I can come up with...

April 25, 2006

Almost three years after Vaughan Thomas says she paid an inflated price at a Montgomery, Ala., hair salon simply for being black, lawyers for Dillard's beauty salons went to court Tuesday to defend the department store from allegations of what Thomas and others call "race-based pricing."

Thomas is one of eight black women suing the department store for racial discrimination after she allegedly was told that Dillard's beauty salons charge black customers more than whites because of the "kinky" nature of "ethnic" hair.

"Hair is hair regardless of what color you are, and the prices should be the same for everybody," Thomas told Courttv.com. "This is a practice that's still being done in the 21st century, and it should be stopped."

While lawyers for Dillard's deny that the retailer practices "race-based pricing," they claim that scientific evidence supports the theory that "ethnic" hair requires more effort to treat — and therefore should be subject to higher pricing.

A defense brief submitted in Alabama federal court cites numerous supposed characteristics of black hair that make treating it more "time consuming and technically demanding than fulfilling the minimal (or non-existent) conditioning needs" of the typical white customer.

"The rendering of professional hair care is a personal service typically tailored to the specific needs and preferences of the individual," Dillard's scientific expert, Mort Westman, said in a deposition. "Numerous factors exist and must be considered during the process of cleansing, conditioning and styling, rendering the resultant treatment somewhat unique."

The brief, which is based in large part on Westman's declaration and a study published in 2003 in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, highlights the "highly brittle, tightly curled" texture of ethnic hair as a factor that prolongs the cleansing portion of the treatment.

The brief also refers to "lack of resiliency" and the frequent use of "intricate coiffures" and extensions as other factors that affect the complexity of drying and styling the hair of black customers.

My impression is that hair cutting establishments tend to be fairly clearly segregated into Black (as in the movies "Barbershop" and "Beauty Shop") vs. All Other. So, the issue of racially discriminating on price doesn't come up much because only one type of customer visits a typical salon.

The same is true for hair care products. Years ago in Chicago, the in-laws of the nice Korean family that did our drycleaning opened a hair care products store next door. So, my wife and I dropped in on their opening day and my wife was going to make a token purchase to help get them started. But she couldn't find a single product in the store that was not specifically formulated for blacks' hair. It was really quite a bizarre scene -- a white couple wandering around a store run by new Korean immigrants that sold products only to blacks.

Ever since I've wondered how the Koreans figured out what to stock in their store since they didn't use any of the products themselves. I suppose wholesalers will just give you a full list of what to order. For a high markup business like cosmetic products, you don't really need to know what you're doing -- just be willing to be open long hours in a marginal neighborhood and you'll do okay. It's pretty amazing, though, that Koreans come from 10,000 miles away to sell black beauty products to blacks in a black neighborhood.

Even the nominally blue-chip news portals are getting in on the act. The New York Times, which sets the agenda for the rest of the mainstream media, has found itself drawn to the Duke case - even though, traditionally, the Times has seen itself as being above such tabloid-y fare.

So why these changing Times? The main reason is competitive pressure; no paper can resist the public fascination with this case. Yet blogger Steve Sailer offers another reason: The Times, he says, loves a story in which blacks might have been criminally victimized by whites, because it reverses the all-too familiar pattern. So the Times jumps at the chance to show whites acting badly, thus elevating the paper's self-appointed status as the arbiter of social and racial justice. As Sailer puts it, "The Duke lacrosse team, a bunch of rich preppie jerks, makes a wonderful target for other whites wishing to parade their moral superiority."

One of the top prospects in the NFL draft is D'Brickashaw Ferguson. D'Brickashaw is a U. of Virginia offensive tackle. His mother named D'Brickashaw after Richard Chamberlain's Father Ralph de Bricassart from "The Thorn Birds" miniseries. I can't think of any other reasons to write the name "D'Brickashaw "

With the generally larger-than-average family, often saddled with the very ordinary surnames Smith, Johnson, or Young, it's not surprising that many Utah parents look for unique given names for their children. When you throw in the reverence for family and ancestors forwarded by the LDS Church, it seems inevitable that someone would end up with LaEarl, KDell, Arnolene or Hariella.

Of course, some guys get all the luck. One of Brigham Young's direct male line descendents won the Heisman Trophy at Brigham Young University, then went on to become perhaps the most gifted quarterback in the history of the NFL. And this Mr. Young didn't get stuck with a Mormon boy's name like "Azer Baloo," "Bretile," "Clemouth, "Denim Levi," "D'Loaf," "EdDean," or "ElVoid," (just to choose a few from the first 5/26th of the Utah Baby Namer for Boys). Nah, he got to be Steve Young. (Okay, I'll admit he sounds like some science nerd, but "Steve" is still a lot better than such only-in-Utah names as "Sterile," "Tabernacle," or "Thermos.")

Clark notes:

The quintessential Utah name often has a French-sounding prefix such as Le-, La-, Ne-, or Va-. Often names appear to have genesis in the combined names of the parents--Veradeane or GlenDora, for example. Related is the practice of feminizing the father's name--as in Vonda (dad is Vaughan) or Danetta. Others, such as Snell or Houser, appear to be surnames called into service as first names.

Related is the curious tendency, more common in Utah than elsewhere, for men (women do not seem to do this) to use the first initial, then the full middle name as the given name, such as L. Flake Rogers, who ran for office in Utah County when we lived there. (Come on, you've noticed this habit among the general authorities of the LDS church!) Besides puzzling over why someone would want to be known as "Flake," it makes one wonder just what the "L" stands for.

So my husband and I entertained ourselves by collecting the often bizarre names we found in Utah publications (including the obituaries, which indicates that this is not a recent fad) and of Utah natives we met... (My personal favorite, LaNondus, came from this source.) Another friend told us of a set of sisters, all of whose names began with "Ja."

Once my husband had Internet access, he collected more names and corresponded with another couple who amused themselves the same way. They made cleverly categorized lists: "The ward choir director's daughters: LaVoice, Choral, Audia."

It makes you wonder what some parents were thinking when, for instance, they named their baby girl Lanae (la-nay)--and she unfortunately ended up with a big nose (le nez [la-nay] in French means "the nose"). Or the girl named M'Lu--are clever wags endlessly asking her to skip to it? And how the heck do people with apostrophes in their names fill out computerized forms? There's no apostrophe space. The guy I really pity, though, is the one saddled with the unfortunate moniker, Rube.

Of course, parents cannot predict what new interpretations the marketplace will bring to the names they lovingly bestow on their offspring. I once worked at a company which had dealings with a woman named LaPriel (pronounced la-prell). When I told my former roommate about this inexplicable first name, she sardonically replied, "What's her sister's name--LaTegrin?"...

Some names, though, seem to defy description--if not pronunciation. While pride of place may have spawned Utahna, how did somebody come up with Wealtha? And while Lloydine's genesis seems plausible, how on earth were Printha or Noy coined? And I have no idea what constitutes the correct pronunciation for Kairle or Tawhnye. (I suspect they may be wildly creative spellings of Carol and Tonya.)

By the way, is this all for real or am I being the victim of an elaborate hoax by cynical Nevadans making fun of their more pious neighbors to the east? I mean, I can believe there's a boy in Utah named "Stockton Malone," but what about "Truss," "Umson" (not to mention "Urmson"), and "Zanderalex" (which I think I got a prescription for when I had a rash).

Well, Google shows that there really have been men named "Elvoid," which I would have thought was a name made up by the bassist in the 1977 punk band Richard Hell and the Voidoids.) So, this can't be a complete hoax, but I'm still not sure I'll completely trust these names.

I would guess that Easterbrook is back at ESPN because Michael Eisner no longer runs the Disney-ABC-ESPN-ETC megamedia company. You'll recall that in October 2003 in one sentence in his former blog on Marty Peretz's New Republic website, Easterbrook seemed to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, as it were, and immediately lost his other job writing about the NFL on Eisner's ESPN. In a twist that Joe Stalin would have saluted, ESPN.com not only fired Easterbrook but deleted all his archives.

The New Republic's Gregg Easterbrook famously denounced this Disney-Miramax production [Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill Vol. I"] for excessive violence, noting, "Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice."

Easterbrook was widely excoriated both for terminal unhipness and for supposedly resurrecting the myth that Jews control the media. Disney supremo Michael Eisner, however, did control Easterbrook's other employer, ESPN, which immediately fired him. Most commentators opined that Easterbrook had it coming.

All I can say is that if Walt Disney were alive today, he'd be spinning in his cryogenic preservation chamber.

At some point, I wish they carried out some IQ studies based on caste/ethnicity in India (without which IQ data is almost meaningless). While I don't think India's low average IQ figures will change, there should be some very revealing differences. I would not be surprised if the difference in average IQs between the successful castes or communities and the less successful ones is greater than the White-Black IQ gap.

People who are trying to paint a rosy picture of India's future based on the fact that it is a democracy need to be a little more cautious. The first thing that concerns me about these predictions is that they do not take into account the gut wrenching increase in inequality between India's rich (or richest) and the poor. The former have become phenomenally richer since 1991, the latter are for the most part stuck exactly where they were 50 years ago - barely surviving. The political consequences of this cannot be ignored. The latter are far more numerous and have hundreds of millions of extra votes. The former can survive by greasing the wheels of India's extremely corrupt state and evading taxes but they cannot prevent a populist backlash that brings in lots of new socialism (as we speak, political pressure is mounting on the Indian Government to introduce "backward caste quotas" in the private sector to mirror what we have in the public sector).

In addition, urbanisation will melt away a large number of differences so that one of the things that made India relatively stable (too much heterogeneity so that you cannot get three or four groups competing - like Iraq for example) will also disappear. As the differences of language and region melt away, society will stratify more along economic classes. This stratification is already there but I believe it will intensify along Latin American lines (and the regional/linguistic/caste divisions will become relatively meaningless - although the rich economic classes will reflect the old caste hierarchy). And we know what is happening in Latin America right now as a result.

It is fashionable for pro-democracy advocates to talk of Chinese collapse. But China does not have anything like the internal contradictions India has to overcome. Their internal differences are miniscule by comparison. And that is scary because a China that becomes the military equivalent of Japan in the 1930s would be a formidable threat to global security. And they can pose that kind of threat precisely because they do not have so many internal differences. In India, the differences are quite incredible. There are politicians in India, for example, that are totally pro-Pakistan (these are politicians who pull in a large percentage of the Muslim vote). The American equivalent would be politicians who would be pro-Taliban or in the Cold War pro-USSR (i.e. completely in favour of an openly hostile enemy).

And this is one the reasons why the British had no trouble ruling over the country for 200 years because the differences were so easy to exploit. To remain in power all they had to do was play one group against another (and it worked like a charm).

Whatever happens, India won't catch up with China. But a military confrontation may not occur because India also has nuclear weapons and has missiles capable of hitting Beijing.

I don't have a strong opinion on the topic because I'm aware of how little I know about India, which has to be the most complicated place on Earth.

April 24, 2006

Richard Lynn's Race Differences in Intelligence:Above is a graph showing the average IQ from 23 studies of Japanese people in Japan (red), 17 studies of Hispanics in the U.S. (green), and 17 studies of Aborigines in Australia (blue). The horizontal axis is the estimated average year born of the sample studied. The virtually horizontal colored lines are the best fit lines. While there is a lot of noise in the data, the stability over the generations is striking.

Ever since the publication of Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations more than four years ago, I've been beating the drums about how hugely important is their finding of a high correlation (r = 0.73) between average national per capita GDP and average national IQ.

Yet this fascinating research has been almost completely spiked in the press. For example, you might think that The Economist would owe its $129-per-year subscribers some coverage of this research that has so many implications for international business and investing.

This profusion of data allows us to do analyses of important issues that haven't been feasible before.

How do high IQ people rationalize to themselves suppressing mention of national differences in average IQ—especially when they spend so much time thinking about how they, personally, are smarter than other people?

A common stratagem, I've found, is to assume that IQ differences matter only if they are genetic in origin. Since no decent, civilized, right-thinking person could possibly believe that racial differences in IQ have any genetic basis, then racial and national differences in average IQ can't possibly exist.

Except—they do exist.

And, as I will show that—no matter what their origin, whether in nature or nurture or both—these IQ gaps will continue to exist for many decades.

“The whole question of trying to make conclusions about ‘national IQs’ from these tests is problematic. Differential national IQ rates could mean that there are inherent differences in IQ, but they could just as easily mean that the socio-cultural-economic differences between nations produce differential IQ scores for environmental reasons… In a few years further genomic studies and fMRI imaging of the brain will tell us far more about heredity and intelligence (and the nature of intelligence) than we can infer today from the wide and rather problematic assortment of statistical studies available today. I think speculation about it is a waste of time right now.”

But (as I responded) it makes no sense to assume that existing IQ gaps have no real-world impact just because they might prove not to be genetic. The overwhelming fact is that—whatever the causes of the disparities may turn out to be—the gaps exist.

And the crucial point is that China appears to have a lead on India of at least one standard deviation (by Lynn's estimate, 1.5 standard deviations or 23 points). From all we know about national IQ trends over time, the possibility of that gap disappearing before, say, 2050, is very small.

Relative differences in average national IQs change even more slowly than, say, relative differences in average national height, which take a couple of generations to fully work through the system.

Since IQs are quite stable from childhood through adulthood, a trailing population's main hope for closing the gap with a higher IQ group rests on its future children.

Let's look at a stylized example. Assume that the IQ gap between two populations, such as China and India, is currently 15 points. And, assume that the babies being born tomorrow in India are suddenly as smart as the babies being born in China.

The red line reflects the growth in the trailing country's workforce's average IQ if the gap disappeared among all babies born in 2006.

The subsequent narrowing of the workforce disparity wouldn't even begin until the 2006 babies started their careers at age 18 in 2024.

If the retirement age is 65 and the population remains stable, then the gap would only be half-closed by 2047, and wouldn't disappear until 2071 (red line in graph below). If it took 2 generations for the average IQs of newborns to catch up, convergence in the workforce wouldn't happen until the 22nd Century (blue line):

So, these gaps will remain crucially important for generations to come. [More]

A reader writes:

Average IQ is not the only relevant factor, and not even clearly the most important relevant factor in assessing, let's put it this way, the relative baseline value of China's and India's human capital. The variance also matters a great deal, as does the specific distribution of talents beyond the raw IQ score.

I would assume Brazil has a significantly lower average IQ than Argentina. But Brazil has a substantial enough population at the high end of the IQ spectrum which, combined with a more creative and entrepreneurial culture, has made Brazil a far more dynamic and important country than Argentina is. (Argentina's dreadful economic policies obviously hurt that country as well, but Brazil's economic policies haven't been exactly world class for much of its history either.)

Indeed, Brazil is one of only four places in the world to compete in the commercial jetliner market. On the other hand, the latest per capita GDP for Argentina is $13,700 versus $8,400 for Brazil. As the saying goes, "Brazil is the country of the future and always will be."

Amy Chua in her book, World on Fire, describes the dangerous downside of having market-dominant minorities. But the upside, for countries from Malaysia to Russia to South Africa to Brazil, has been substantially greater economic development than would have been possible otherwise.

So assume for the sake of argument that India has a very substantial minority of the population (say, the top quintile or decile) that is at least as smart as the comparable segment of the Chinese population. This could certainly be the case if the standard deviation of Indian IQ is substantially higher than for Chinese IQ, and/or if a big reason for the IQ gap between the two countries is relative malnutrition of the huge rural Indian population. Assume further that India has certain cultural advantages, some of which may be related to the natural endowments of the population and others of which are pure accidents of history (like the British colonial inheritance). Assume further that the caste system in India actually serves to bind the market-dominant minority of Indians to the rest of the population (the Hindus, anyway). If all of these assumptions are true (which is a big if, admittedly), I think you could make a strong case for betting on India in spite of the gap in average IQ.

One interesting sidelight is that both countries' educational policies appear to be rationally taking into account the apparent difference in IQ variances between them. India has invested a lot in elite higher education, while China has done a better job of getting the masses up to a minimum level of education, while skimping so far on world class higher education.

The man the Bears are counting on to solve their secondary woes has his own problems right now.

Ricky Manning Jr., whom the Bears signed to an offer sheet worth as much as $21 million Friday, was arrested shortly after 3 a.m. Sunday in Los Angeles and charged with assault with a deadly weapon after a melee at a Denny's restaurant left a patron unconscious.

Manning, 25, was bailed out of jail, and Los Angeles Police Department detective Robert Lewis said late Sunday that a court date has not been set... According to Lewis, Manning was in a group that attacked a man in the restaurant after teasing him for working on a laptop computer.

"The group began by making comments that the victim looked like a geek or a nerd,'' Lewis said.

The victim asked the group to stop and then complained to a Denny's manager before someone in the group punched him in the face. He then was punched and kicked by multiple attackers until losing consciousness, Lewis said.

The group fled the restaurant, but the car Manning was in was pulled over by officers just blocks from the scene in Westwood Village near the campus of UCLA, where he played in college. According to Lewis, the victim, whom he would not identify, regained consciousness and identified Manning as one of his attackers. Manning has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon because the attack involved people kicking the victim with shoes on, Lewis said.

A source said Manning has said he was at the restaurant but had no part in the melee. It is not the first time Manning has been arrested. He was charged with assault after a bar fight in the same area five years ago today. His record has been clean since joining the NFL.

I can't wait for the "Law & Order" episode that rips this story from the headlines, but changes the attacker into a professional lacrosse player who has just signed a $21 million dollar contract.

Scientists believe exposure to ultraviolet rays may stimulate the release of chemicals in the blood which produce a natural high. The team from Wake Forest University in North Carolina say this may explain why some people are prepared to ignore the cancer risk of too much sun. The research is published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

Professor Steven Feldman The Wake Forest team analysed 14 people, aged between 16 and 34, who typically used tanning beds two times a week. Each volunteer spent 15 minutes lying on a sunbed which exposed them to UV rays and then on another - again for 15 minutes - which released no rays. The volunteers were not told which beds released UV.

The subjects were asked if they would like to return days later and use a sunbed of their own choosing. Twelve returned and 95% [?] opted for the bed which radiated UV light. They said it made them feel good and helped them relax. The researchers believe that tanning may release endorphins into the bloodstream.

A reader writes:

I've always just assumed (probably based on something I heard a million years ago) that sunbathing makes whites feel good because their bodies crave sunlight to generate vitamin D (there's a Russian family near me, when the sun comes out after a patch of dreary weather, the mother is religious about getting out and getting some sun...).

This might be sex-linked. I've never really understood white girls attraction to sunbathing (I've know a number who were near religious about it). It cant just be the opportunity to lie around with most of their clothes off; they'll do it with or without public exposure.

My guess is that blondish people find that tanning does the most for their mood. Red-headed people don't tan much and others are already tan. But has any research been done on this?

A reader writes:

The research that I've seen on this topic implicates not tanning as the mood enhancer, but sunlight to the retina. This causes a stimulation of melatonin production, presumably among other things. It's been found that even the blind respond to light exposure this way. Artificial solar light panels are now widely available as treatment for so-called SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, the form of depression caused by lack of light during the winter months. I've no idea whether the amount of exposure to solar radiation is cumulative; if it were, all the tanners would be manic, I suppose. But it seems possible that sunbathing provides such an intense amount of solar exposure to the retina that moods are improved.

Does that mean that you get less of a boost from the sunshine if you wear sunglasses?

The growing criticism by retired generals of the Bush Administration's war in Iraq is driving many neocons into furies of rationalization as to why lèse-majesté is a threat to the Republic. A reader writes:

Do you think that the neocons realize that some of their criticism of the retired generals comes dangerously close to the Nazi's Fuhrer principle? One of the most important steps in the road to disaster for Germany was the requirement that the officer corps swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler instead of to the republic or the nation.

Increasingly, i see the same mistake being made by vocal hawks. Although, in truth, i see the explicit argument made more on warblogs than in newspaper columns. Essentially, they say, retired officers may not voice an opinion that disagrees with the civilian leadership. It is fine, however, for retired officers to support the SecDef, or President. They may even campaign for him.

i do not see why any jerk with a modem is allowed to have an opinion on Iraq or Iran and can even advocate war and more war. But the men who have most knowledge about war, strategy and logistics must be silent. Frankly, I want to hear more from them and less from JPod or Ledeen.

Another noted:

Max Boot spoke at the Philadelphia Society a few weeks ago, and his presence has provoked something of a revolt among some of that conservative talk shop's longtime members. His speech--in which he implied that anyone using the word "neocon" was an anti-Semite--was a jeremiad against anyone criticizing the Iraq war. In so doing, he explained his own philosophy of "conservative interventionism" and "armed Wilsonianism," both of which seemed divorced from both historical and present reality. (Besides, his speech was filled with howlers, like "The American people repudiated Nixon's realism." When did that happen, in 1972?) No surprise that Boot is attacking guys like General Zinni, who was CinC Centcom and actually might know a little something about the Middle East.

Another notes:

I remember in 1996 Clinton was petrified of Colin Powell running. It was detailed in Dick Morris' book. They cooked up a plan to deal with him, and it was exactly what you described; That any general who opposes the president represents some sort of military coup. funny.

Another thing I thought was funny.... According to Morris, Clinton seethed at the prospect of the press annointing Powell and treating him with kid gloves because he was black. That would have been delicious. To see THE elite get the same treatment thousands of middle-management white males get every day.

The growing criticism by retired generals of the Bush Administration's war in Iraq is driving many neocons into furies of rationalization as to why lèse-majesté is a threat to the Republic. A reader writes:

Do you think that the neocons realize that some of their criticism of the retired generals comes dangerously close to the Nazi's Fuhrer principle? One of the most important steps in the road to disaster for Germany was the requirement that the officer corps swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler instead of to the republic or the nation.

Increasingly, i see the same mistake being made by vocal hawks. Although, in truth, i see the explicit argument made more on warblogs than in newspaper columns. Essentially, they say, retired officers may not voice an opinion that disagrees with the civilian leadership. It is fine, however, for retired officers to support the SecDef, or President. They may even campaign for him.

i do not see why any jerk with a modem is allowed to have an opinion on Iraq or Iran and can even advocate war and more war. But the men who have most knowledge about war, strategy and logistics must be silent. Frankly, I want to hear more from them and less from JPod or Ledeen.

Another noted:

Max Boot spoke at the Philadelphia Society a few weeks ago, and his presence has provoked something of a revolt among some of that conservative talk shop's longtime members. His speech--in which he implied that anyone using the word "neocon" was an anti-Semite--was a jeremiad against anyone criticizing the Iraq war. In so doing, he explained his own philosophy of "conservative interventionism" and "armed Wilsonianism," both of which seemed divorced from both historical and present reality. (Besides, his speech was filled with howlers, like "The American people repudiated Nixon's realism." When did that happen, in 1972?) No surprise that Boot is attacking guys like General Zinni, who was CinC Centcom and actually might know a little something about the Middle East.

Another notes:

I remember in 1996 Clinton was petrified of Colin Powell running. It was detailed in Dick Morris' book. They cooked up a plan to deal with him, and it was exactly what you described; That any general who opposes the president represents some sort of military coup. funny.

Another thing I thought was funny.... According to Morris, Clinton seethed at the prospect of the press annointing Powell and treating him with kid gloves because he was black. That would have been delicious. To see THE elite get the same treatment thousands of middle-management white males get every day.

Scientists believe exposure to ultraviolet rays may stimulate the release of chemicals in the blood which produce a natural high. The team from Wake Forest University in North Carolina say this may explain why some people are prepared to ignore the cancer risk of too much sun. The research is published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

Professor Steven Feldman The Wake Forest team analysed 14 people, aged between 16 and 34, who typically used tanning beds two times a week. Each volunteer spent 15 minutes lying on a sunbed which exposed them to UV rays and then on another - again for 15 minutes - which released no rays. The volunteers were not told which beds released UV.

The subjects were asked if they would like to return days later and use a sunbed of their own choosing. Twelve returned and 95% [?] opted for the bed which radiated UV light. They said it made them feel good and helped them relax. The researchers believe that tanning may release endorphins into the bloodstream.

A reader writes:

I've always just assumed (probably based on something I heard a million years ago) that sunbathing makes whites feel good because their bodies crave sunlight to generate vitamin D (there's a Russian family near me, when the sun comes out after a patch of dreary weather, the mother is religious about getting out and getting some sun...).

This might be sex-linked. I've never really understood white girls attraction to sunbathing (I've know a number who were near religious about it). It cant just be the opportunity to lie around with most of their clothes off; they'll do it with or without public exposure.

My guess is that blondish people find that tanning does the most for their mood. Red-headed people don't tan much and others are already tan. But has any research been done on this?

A reader writes:

The research that I've seen on this topic implicates not tanning as the mood enhancer, but sunlight to the retina. This causes a stimulation of melatonin production, presumably among other things. It's been found that even the blind respond to light exposure this way. Artificial solar light panels are now widely available as treatment for so-called SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, the form of depression caused by lack of light during the winter months. I've no idea whether the amount of exposure to solar radiation is cumulative; if it were, all the tanners would be manic, I suppose. But it seems possible that sunbathing provides such an intense amount of solar exposure to the retina that moods are improved.

Does that mean that you get less of a boost from the sunshine if you wear sunglasses?

Richard Lynn's Race Differences in Intelligence:Above is a graph showing the average IQ from 23 studies of Japanese people in Japan (red), 17 studies of Hispanics in the U.S. (green), and 17 studies of Aborigines in Australia (blue). The horizontal axis is the estimated average year born of the sample studied. The virtually horizontal colored lines are the best fit lines. While there is a lot of noise in the data, the stability over the generations is striking.

Ever since the publication of Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations more than four years ago, I've been beating the drums about how hugely important is their finding of a high correlation (r = 0.73) between average national per capita GDP and average national IQ.

Yet this fascinating research has been almost completely spiked in the press. For example, you might think that The Economist would owe its $129-per-year subscribers some coverage of this research that has so many implications for international business and investing.

This profusion of data allows us to do analyses of important issues that haven't been feasible before.

How do high IQ people rationalize to themselves suppressing mention of national differences in average IQ—especially when they spend so much time thinking about how they, personally, are smarter than other people?

A common stratagem, I've found, is to assume that IQ differences matter only if they are genetic in origin. Since no decent, civilized, right-thinking person could possibly believe that racial differences in IQ have any genetic basis, then racial and national differences in average IQ can't possibly exist.

Except—they do exist.

And, as I will show that—no matter what their origin, whether in nature or nurture or both—these IQ gaps will continue to exist for many decades.

“The whole question of trying to make conclusions about ‘national IQs’ from these tests is problematic. Differential national IQ rates could mean that there are inherent differences in IQ, but they could just as easily mean that the socio-cultural-economic differences between nations produce differential IQ scores for environmental reasons… In a few years further genomic studies and fMRI imaging of the brain will tell us far more about heredity and intelligence (and the nature of intelligence) than we can infer today from the wide and rather problematic assortment of statistical studies available today. I think speculation about it is a waste of time right now.”

But (as I responded) it makes no sense to assume that existing IQ gaps have no real-world impact just because they might prove not to be genetic. The overwhelming fact is that—whatever the causes of the disparities may turn out to be—the gaps exist.

And the crucial point is that China appears to have a lead on India of at least one standard deviation (by Lynn's estimate, 1.5 standard deviations or 23 points). From all we know about national IQ trends over time, the possibility of that gap disappearing before, say, 2050, is very small.

Relative differences in average national IQs change even more slowly than, say, relative differences in average national height, which take a couple of generations to fully work through the system.

Since IQs are quite stable from childhood through adulthood, a trailing population's main hope for closing the gap with a higher IQ group rests on its future children.

Let's look at a stylized example. Assume that the IQ gap between two populations, such as China and India, is currently 15 points. And, assume that the babies being born tomorrow in India are suddenly as smart as the babies being born in China.

The red line reflects the growth in the trailing country's workforce's average IQ if the gap disappeared among all babies born in 2006.

The subsequent narrowing of the workforce disparity wouldn't even begin until the 2006 babies started their careers at age 18 in 2024.

If the retirement age is 65 and the population remains stable, then the gap would only be half-closed by 2047, and wouldn't disappear until 2071 (red line in graph below). If it took 2 generations for the average IQs of newborns to catch up, convergence in the workforce wouldn't happen until the 22nd Century (blue line):

So, these gaps will remain crucially important for generations to come. [More]

Scientists believe exposure to ultraviolet rays may stimulate the release of chemicals in the blood which produce a natural high. The team from Wake Forest University in North Carolina say this may explain why some people are prepared to ignore the cancer risk of too much sun. The research is published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

Professor Steven Feldman The Wake Forest team analysed 14 people, aged between 16 and 34, who typically used tanning beds two times a week. Each volunteer spent 15 minutes lying on a sunbed which exposed them to UV rays and then on another - again for 15 minutes - which released no rays. The volunteers were not told which beds released UV.

The subjects were asked if they would like to return days later and use a sunbed of their own choosing. Twelve returned and 95% [?] opted for the bed which radiated UV light. They said it made them feel good and helped them relax. The researchers believe that tanning may release endorphins into the bloodstream.

A reader writes:

I've always just assumed (probably based on something I heard a million years ago) that sunbathing makes whites feel good because their bodies crave sunlight to generate vitamin D (there's a Russian family near me, when the sun comes out after a patch of dreary weather, the mother is religious about getting out and getting some sun...).

This might be sex-linked. I've never really understood white girls attraction to sunbathing (I've know a number who were near religious about it). It cant just be the opportunity to lie around with most of their clothes off; they'll do it with or without public exposure.

My guess is that blondish people find that tanning does the most for their mood. Red-headed people don't tan much and others are already tan. But has any research been done on this?

A reader writes:

The research that I've seen on this topic implicates not tanning as the mood enhancer, but sunlight to the retina. This causes a stimulation of melatonin production, presumably among other things. It's been found that even the blind respond to light exposure this way. Artificial solar light panels are now widely available as treatment for so-called SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, the form of depression caused by lack of light during the winter months. I've no idea whether the amount of exposure to solar radiation is cumulative; if it were, all the tanners would be manic, I suppose. But it seems possible that sunbathing provides such an intense amount of solar exposure to the retina that moods are improved.

Does that mean that you get less of a boost from the sunshine if you wear sunglasses?

Here's the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: "You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps." You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.

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